Post * yQPMe — Curious Curator

› added 6 years ago

279

TIL: These red ticks called the Lone Star Tick can make you allergic to red meat with their bite.

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Z4JY TIL that a ruby is just a red sapphire. Both are the mineral corundum, a type of aluminum oxide, rubies just have a chromium impurity making them red.

Zp964 TIL Dr. Sigmund Freud was addicted to smoking and failed to quit for good throughout a 45 years long battle that included 33 operations for cancer of the jaw, an artificial jaw replacement, and attacks of "tobacco angina" exacerbated by nicotine . He was known to smoke up to twenty cigars a day.

nW9Qo TIL a study found that George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire contains over 2,000 named characters with over 41,000 interactions b/w them. Yet the most prominent characters avg out to have only 150 others to keep track of, which is the same number the avg human brain has evolved to deal with.

P1j8e TIL that the French treasure hunt 'On The Trail Of The Golden Owl', launched in 1993 by Max Valentin, finally ended on October 3, 2024 when the golden owl was found—making it the second longest treasure hunt ever organized.

newwb TIL WWII shipwrecks are an important source of "low background steel" (i.e. steel produced before the introduction of nuclear weapons) required to produced devices sensitive to radioactivity.